Rescue Efforts Underway For Lost Teenage Sailor

UPDATE (Friday, 12:15 pm PDT): Abby Sunderland and her boat have been spotted by Australian search and rescue teams. Contact was made with Abby, and she is alive and in “good spirits.” Her extraction from the vessel is expected to completed within hours.

Abby Sunderland, the 16-year-old sailor who is attempting to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo, has been lost at sea since early Thursday morning, and the US Coast Guard is frantically trying to reach her last known location in the southern Indian Ocean.

Sunderland was fighting wind gusts of as much as 60 knots in her 40-foot boat, Wild Eyes, approximately 2,000 miles east of Madagascar when her satellite phone connection with her parents suddenly dropped out. Shortly thereafter, two of her boat’s emergency beacons remotely alertly alerted the US Coast Guard that Wild Eyes was in trouble.

The view from Sunderland's boat on June 5, 2010Sunderland set sail from southern California in January and had been constantly updating her personal blog with updates from the open water. Just yesterday, though, Sunderland posted a dire-sounding message:

The last few days have pretty busy out here. I’ve been in some rough weather for awhile with winds steady at 40-45 knots with higher gusts. With that front passing, the conditions were lighter today. It was a nice day today with some lighter winds which gave me a chance to patch everything up. Wild Eyes was great through everything but after a day with over 50 knots at times, I had quite a bit of work to do.

She also wrote how the wind had been unpredictable and gusty, and that Wild Eyes was “rolling around like crazy.” An hour after the dropped sat phone call between her and her parents, the Coast Guard discovered that two of her three emergency beacons, known as EPIRBs, had started emitting a distress signal. For those EPIRBs that are water-activated, the signal is put out once the boat has been submerged to a certain depth or taken on a specific amount of water. In Sunderland’s case, her parents were able to determine that two of her EPIRBs had been activated manually. Her third EPIRB, a water-activated model, has not been activated.

Rescue boats are en route to Sunderland’s last-known coordinates, but are not expected to reach the site for another 40 hours.